Today is my 22nd birthday, and with that comes a lot of feelings; feelings of eagerness, anxiousness, nervousness, and pride. 22 is pretty damn old. I decided to put my 21st year into review to see what I have accomplished and what I have learned along the way.
RU Mine
For those of you that may not know, RU Mine is a dating app that I started with a friend of mine to help connect students in my school with one another. We launched this app when I was 20, but obviously a lot of work has gone into it since then. I worked and launched the following features while I was 21:
- RU Mine V2 (Updated UI, swiping mechanics, less crashes, fixed bugs, smoother experience, cleaned up old profiles)
- RU Mine Merch Photoshoot (Had our first photoshoot with a professional photographer)
- RU Mine Merch Launch (We designed and sold hats, condoms, certificates of ownership, and donated to WWF)
- RU Friends (A friend finder that matches based on classes, interests, music taste, and hobbies)
- Community Update (Course groups, groups with timelines and posts, and group chats)
- FindMyGroupChats.ca (Course group chat locator)
- RU Bot or Not (Valentine's Day event where a user has to decide if the person they are conversing with is a robot or human)
We were also written about twice for RU Mine, both times for our community update (here and here).
FindMyVax
I created a vaccine locator website with the same friend I made RU Mine with and managed to help over 40,000 Canadians find a vaccine in the provinces and territories. We had close to 7,000 clinics in the system by the end, each receiving an update every 30 seconds. We worked for 2 weeks to reverse engineer and design a series of Python scripts to get by the various levels of scrape blocking technology the sites used in order to collect and display the data in one place. The entire system used Java, Python, PHP, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript. Some things I'm proud of:
- Over 40,000 Canadians Used Our Site
- Nearly 7000 Locations Across Canada
- Over 10,000 Daily Emails Sent
Some of the most rewarding feelings was reading the comments we received on our BuyMeACoffee page and in our email. We got so many people thanking us for creating the tool; we even had one person tell us that they had found vaccines for the whole family within minutes with our site. The amount of thanks we received for such a simple tool was astonishing. We were also written about in DailyHive, MyToastLife, The EyeOpener, mentioned on Toronto's 99.9 Virgin Radio, posted on Ryerson University's LinkedIn, posted by the Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science for being community innovators, and interviewed by Ryerson radio.
Rocket Engine
Despite all the software projects I do, I am actually studying mechanical engineering in school and have a love for rocketry. I decided this summer that I wanted to finally build a rocket engine in my garage, so I set forth to do just that. I had learned a lot about thermodynamics, heat transfer, material science, machining and manufacturing, and organic chemistry in school, but I needed to supplement my education by teaching myself combustion physics and combustion chemistry. I pulled up various research papers, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and one-off websites to get the ball rolling; sure enough, a few hours later I had a design for my first rocket engine. I decided to make the engine a hybrid, meaning it runs on liquid oxygen and solid fuel. Once all the math was done, I placed an order for the metal, bought a drill press, got my fuel, and waited to build the thing.
I finally got around to building it about a month after I had completed the design, and I machined nearly the entire thing in my garage with a $60 drill press off of Kijiji (with the exception of the nozzle interior, I needed more torque than my press could provide). After two days of creating fire gaskets, tapping my drilled holes, modifying a propane regulator for oxygen, it was finally show time. I had my friend help me strap the engine to a ladder, create a solid base so it wouldn't go flying, and then we lit that baby up. I am proud to say that it worked on the first successful ignition, ran for a solid 10-15 seconds, and then lived to tell the tale. I got awesome videos of it too, and I will be uploading a YouTube video about it eventually.
This is honestly probably one of my proudest projects. It was my first time designing something physical from scratch and then building it myself. Add the fact that it is essentially a controlled explosion that I taught myself how to do, you can probably understand why it really holds a special place in my heart. I have plans to build another variant of the engine with liquid fuel, a fuel injector, and a turbo pump. We'll see how that goes!
Social Scoop
Social Scoop was a media publication I created that aimed to create community-driven content written by students for students. We launched the website on Valentine's Day (back to back with RU Bot or Not), along with a podcast hosted by a very talented Ryerson student. Ultimately, Social Scoop proved to be a bit more complicated to operate than I had anticipated, and I put it on hold for now. It was a great experiment and taught me a lot about working with content creators. Social Scoop had the following achievements:
- Podcast Launched (6 episodes available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, discussing community events, issues, and societal challenges)
- Bi-Weekly Articles (Covering friendships, dating, pop culture, romance)
- Over 10,000 Visitors (Over 3 months)
Even though this didn't work out as I had hoped, I learned a lot and will cherish the memories of pulling all nighters with my good friend and podcast editor to get the episodes up for the morning.
Misc. Software Projects
I also worked on a lot of other software projects that either didn't get to see the light of day or aren't as thrust-into-the-spotlight as my others. These include:
- adidas B2B Demo (Customer suggestions with graph databases)
- CoolShitWeekly (A weekly newsletter)
- Hive (A COVID compliance management app)
- Encrypted Messaging Platform (Designed for students and teachers to keep in touch during COVID)
- Flixer (A dating app that matches users based on shared movie and TV show taste)
School
21 saw my hardest year of engineering, by far. With the confusion associated with online school and the already incredible difficulty of the courses, it was a really rough year school wise. This year I:
- Wrote a Material Science Thesis on 3D Printing Packaging Materials
- Designed a Factory's Water System
- Designed a Transmission Gearbox
- Designed a Heat Exchanger
- Designed a Spring Damper for Apartment Buildings
- Designed a Figure-8 Linkage System
- Designed a Coffee Mug Gripper Tool
- Designed a Pascal Calculator
- Wrote a Report Suggesting Alternative Energy Generation Methods for the West Coast
Personal
Personally, I also accomplished quite a few goals that I am very proud of. These include:
- Completing Goggin's 4x4x48 Challange
- Getting Closer with Family and Friends
- Started to Learn Guitar
- Started to Learn to Skateboard
- Hit 225 lbs on Bench Press
- Gave Sales Presentations
- Gave Presentation Demos
- Learned to Lead Generate
- Learned to Cold Email
- Learned to Cold Call
- Wrote a Report about COVID Compliance for Ryerson
I'm sure there is probably more I'm proud of personally, but that's the list that comes to me immediately.
--
21 was a really good year, and I look forward to doing even more at 22. Cheers!